COVENTRY Cathedral has received a special Christmas present from the other side of the world.

Schoolchildren in Hiroshima, Japan, have handcrafted 1,000 multi-coloured origami birds to adorn the cathedral’s Chapel of Unity and pupils from John Gulson primary school have symbolically accepted the gift from their far-flung friends.

The intricate paper cranes, which have travelled 5,000 miles, represent the friendship that has developed between Coventry and Hiroshima over the past 70 years.

Coventry Cathedral marks Hiroshima Day on August 6 each year, while the people of Hiroshima hold an annual service on the anniversary of the Coventry Blitz.

Stella Roberts of Coventry Quakers, who help to organise Coventry’s Hiroshima Day, said origami cranes are a symbol of peace and prosperity, made famous by a little girl who was in Hiroshima when the city was bombed.

She said: “The story goes that if you make 1,000 paper cranes in your lifetime you will find happiness and prosperity.

“Sadako Sasaki was a little girl with leukaemia who started to fold 1,000 paper cranes but she didn’t get the chance to finish them.

“After her death her friends finished them off for her and now people send them to Hiroshima.

“There’s a huge tower of them in the Hiroshima Peace Park and you can find a similar thing at Ground Zero in New York.”

Coventry has a special link with the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were destroyed by atomic bombs dropped by the USA in the Second World War.

Like Coventry, both places later became cities of peace.

Strings of paper cranes from Hiroshima have hung in Coventry’s Chapel of Unity for the past five years.

But as an act of friendship a Japanese visitor to this year’s Hiroshima Day service at the cathedral said she would make sure the cranes were renewed.

She arranged for the pupils of two classes in Hiroshima’s Bishamondai Primary School to replace the paper birds.

Pupils from John Gulson primary school were invited to the cathedral, where the cranes are now on display, to receive the gift from their peers.

John Gulson pupil Sannah Ali, aged eight, of Radford, said: “I’ve tried origami before at school and at home but I don’t think I could make anything like this.

“They are so decorative and colourful. I would like to say thank you to all the children who made them and gave them to us.